Hi Eelco. > [Nix supports] parallelism between builds, [but] not *within* builds, so > if you're rebuilding OpenOffice, [multiple CPUs don't] help you :-(
I see. The problem is that Nix has too simplistic a notion of arguments that are being passed to an expression. There are two kinds of arguments: those that influence the result of the build and those that do not influence the result of the build. An obvious example for the latter kind are warnings: a binary that has been compiled with "-Wall" does not differ from one that has been compiled with "-Wno-all". Similarly, a build that has been driven by "make --silent" doesn't differ from one that was driven by "make --debug". Nix doesn't know that. Now, this is not a severe problem, because parallelism can often be achieved by building several expressions at once, but in the long run this deficit should be remedied, because lack of -j<n> support also means that Nix cannot support distcc, etc. > Undoubtedly Gentoo people regularly build packages with specific -j > flags, so they probably know how much breakage it causes... Yes, as a matter of fact one of those packages that breaks down in a concurrent build is Nix itself. The dependencies are incomplete. I suspect the problem is in the aterm library. I could probably submit a patch. Which makes me wonder: is it possible to get SVN access? It feels like posting code and/or patches to the mailing list is not the best way to participate. Best regards, Peter _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
